Ongoing negotiations with the neighbors ended up trimming the center’s footprint in the park. In 2019, the New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division finally dismissed the last challenge. The project also ran into headwinds from neighbors who raised legal challenges based on Gilder’s incursion into a corner of the park. The pandemic was only partly the problem. And Ellen Futter, Natural History’s long-serving, visionary president, who spearheaded both the Rose Center and Gilder expansions, retired in March. The city’s contribution grew to $92 million. The budget has risen to $465 million as construction costs skyrocketed during the pandemic. Richard Gilder, the banker and philanthropist who seeded funding for the new wing, died in 2020. Since 2014, the institution’s 150th anniversary has come and gone. But some of the most intelligent and complex work by Studio Gang helps to rationalize the flow of visitors and make intuitive internal connections so people can focus more on collections, as opposed to wayfinding.ĭelays plagued the project. Gilder certainly doesn’t solve the whole problem. But for millions of visitors, the museum could be a frustrating maze, circulation a fiasco. To regulars, former dead-end galleries, like the ones for gems and minerals, were akin to Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley: secret, magical places. This one seems destined to be an instant heartthrob and colossal attraction. New Yorkers live to grouse about new buildings.

Like them, Gilder is spectacular: a poetic, joyful, theatrical work of public architecture and a highly sophisticated flight of sculptural fantasy. I wouldn’t go so far as to equate it with the curvaceous genius of Gaudi or with Saarinen’s groovy TWA Terminal, but it’s in the family. It becomes an atrium in the guise of a towering canyon, a city block deep.įor its architects, Jeanne Gang and her team, Gilder was clearly a gamble and leap of faith, bucking today’s innocuous norms, almost begging for charges of starchitectural self-indulgence. Past the front doors, that cliff face morphs. When plans for it first surfaced, I wondered if the new Gilder Center at the Natural History museum might end up looking overcooked.įrom the outside it’s a white-pink granite cliff with yawning windows shaped a little like the openings to caves, nestling the museum’s wonderful Romanesque Revival addition from the turn of the last century.

I Once Was a Monkey by Jeanne M. Lee